Heronstairs Fluff AUs
by ashesandhoney
Summary: This is a collection of Will/Jem fluff pieces - most of them are all human - most of them are based on Tumblr prompts.
1. Library

Based on the prompt: **Librarian/Avid Read AU**

"Your boy is back," Bernice said wheeling a cart of books by the table in the backroom where Jem was glaring at the computer and trying to figure out why the cataloguing system kept shutting itself down.

"Thank you," he said and Bernice wiggled her eyebrows at him before she took the cart out through the swinging door to go and shelve them. He waited until she was gone before he grinned and went to collect the pile of books he had ordered in from libraries across the region.

Out at the desk, Will was reading through a "What's Happening!" newsletter and leaning. He always seemed to lean against something, desks, bookshelves, table tops. The first time Jem had met him, he had leaned down against the table where he was working and waited until he looked up. Jem had been weeding at the time, sorting out the books no one had checked out in years to be taken off the shelf.

"Do you work here?" the guy with dark hair and deep blue eyes had asked.

"No, I sort outdated books about fungus for fun," Jem said holding up the book in his hand which looked like it had been printed in the 1970s and hadn't been opened since that day.

"Right," he said pulling it out of his hands and flipping it open to a poorly drawn diagram of a field mushroom, "Thrilling stuff."

"Yes, I work here," Jem said. He was very good at charming little old ladies in search of Nora Roberts novels. He was very good at convincing small children to attempt to read chapter books. He was not good at finding things to say to attractive young men with graceful fingers and sarcastic smiles.

"If I needed books on the histories of hauntings in the area, where would I start?" he asked.

"Start in the 130s or try the catalogue," was Jem's immediate answer. It came out flat and sarcastic because this guy was really attractive and it was short circuiting his brain. Besides, he was probably screwing around, young people who knew how to use computers didn't ask questions like that.

"Ok, right, yes, but what about after I've read those ones? My friend said that you can special order in series she wants to read. Can you special order in reference material too?" he asked. "I'm looking for books on hauntings in the south or central British Isles."

The rest of that afternoon had been spent with William Herondale leaning over his shoulder as they paged through catalogues for every library within a hundred miles and making lists. Will was sharp and bright and funny and he went from attractive to heart stopping when he laughed. He laughed often as he discovered how little Jem believed in ghosts and how many of the things he said were sarcastic. Most people never got Jem's comments but here Will was cracking up at every joke.

Now he was back. Jem took a moment to carefully stack up the books. He had had too long to think about that afternoon. He had read things in that hadn't happened and he'd talked himself out of anything that might have. He was going to be awkward and end up saying something utterly inappropriate. Will didn't look up from the engrossing read about the Thursday evening knitting circle as Jem quietly put the books on the desk and slid them across the table.

Will flashed him that smile when he noticed. Big and bright and better than Jem remembered it. Whatever he had wanted he was going to say fled before that smile. He returned it and their eyes held in an elastic moment.

"Your books came in," Jem said.

"I can see that," Will said.

"What are you going to do with them?" Jem asked.

"Read them. It's the primary function of a book, to be read," Will said.

"Is it really? Here I thought it was to decorate the walls not displaying the DVD rentals," Jem said which got him one of Will's laughs.

"I'm a writer. History mostly but all this," he waved at his stack of books, "Is research for a novel that I will never finish because fiction is ridiculous."

"Can I read it?" Jem asked.

"Never finishing it," Will said.

"That's an awful lot of work for never finishing it," Jem said looking at the books.

"You don't know many authors do you?" Will said and then he leaned over the desk into just the edge of Jem's personal space, "Let me tell you a secret. We aren't made of blood and bone, we're made of unfinished manuscripts and brilliant ideas that never work. Also coffee."

"Librarians on the other hand are made of organizational systems, anticipation for new releases and funding crises. And also coffee," Jem said.

"So you're asking me out for coffee then?" Will asked raising his eyebrows. For a moment Jem was 14 again and saying the wrong thing and about to get punched but only a moment. Will was still leaning across the desk and he was still smiling.

"I don't know, I hear authors can't commit and never finish what they start," came out of Jem's mouth.

Will's smile got wider, "True and librarians probably don't have enough money to buy a cup of decent coffee."

"I'm offended, you definitely aren't getting coffee now," Jem said. He had no idea how to flirt and yet, here he was leaning his elbows down against the desk to match up with Will's body language and get just a little closer.

"Fine, then," Will said standing up and stepping back and the fluttery feeling in Jem's chest crashed down into bits. He had no idea what he was doing and he had somehow made a mess of it. Why didn't he have a normal sense of humour? Why was he so incompetent at human interaction? He had no idea what to say to salvage this.

"I'll buy you cake too," Jem said.

"Chocolate?" Will asked leaning back down.

"Absolutely," Jem said.

Will grabbed a note pad off of Jem's side of the desk, passing close enough that Jem now knew what his hair smelled like. He scribbled some things down and then tucked the little square of paper into Jem's hand before he flashed him a grin.

"See you soon," he said and then he took his pile of books and sauntered away leaving Jem to stare after him.


	2. Park Bench

Based on the prompt: **Sharing a Park Bench**

Will read in the park for only one reason. Oh he told his friends and family that he enjoyed the fresh air and that it was a welcome distraction from his job and his studies but those weren't the real reasons. The real reason was the violinist.

The violinist played covers of pop songs and pieces written by Bach and Mozart and composers that Will couldn't name. He was as tall as Will was but thinner. He was unsettlingly beautiful. Not girlish, but still beautiful was a better word than handsome. He was smiles and kindnesses and would crouch down to talk to children who asked him ridiculous questions. The week after he was asked to play "Let It Go" by a seven year old girl with a braid over her shoulder, he had learned it.

Will did not sit near him. He didn't want to be noticed. He sat near enough to hear and each week he'd walk by and drop too much money in the violinist's case while he was talking and smiling with someone else. Will sat on the bench around the flower garden so that usually, his back was to the boy who threw all of himself in to each song. When it was a busy Saturday, he'd turn and look and watch the way he moved like the music was being pulled out of every inch of him.

Will had an ereader onto which he had loaded very nearly every poem he'd ever read so that he could read things that matched up with the day's selections. He got to know the moods of the violinist with his flashing eyes and bleached out hair. Some days were melancholic. Some days were joyous. Some days were about nature and slow edges. Some days were vibrant and almost ridiculous.

Every single Saturday afternoon, he made his way here. He reorganized plans to make it happen. He found his violinist and gave up two or three hours to just listening and reading.

Or he did until the day that the violinist wasn't playing. Will got to the park and settled in on his bench and there was no music. Disappointment rolled through him like he was being denied things far deeper than a free musical performance. He opened his reader and read his favourites and tried to remember what the music was supposed to sound like. A solitary violin lifting and falling and turning like the notes were steps in a dance.

Someone dropped down beside him in a rush of hurried energy and Will broke away from his poems and his memories of melodies to look at the interruption. It was his violinist. His violinist had dropped onto his bench with his violin case and a distant look in his eye. Without the instrument and the crowd of onlookers and his smile, he was strangely human. Not as ethereal as Will usually imagined him to be.

Just a boy with a leather case.

"Are you alright?" Will asked him.

"Of course," he said but he looked at Will with eyes like the forest at night. So dark they were almost black but layered and deep. He wore a jacket pushed to his elbows and he didn't so much hold the violin case as cradle it.

"Will you play today?" Will asked because he didn't have anything else to say.

"I have an audition tonight," the boy said, "I should be practicing. I shouldn't be playing silly Disney songs and that same Prelude over and over. I should be practicing."

"They'll love you," Will said. There was honest fear in the boy's voice, like he doubted that he was capable of the audition. Will couldn't imagine it. He couldn't imagine anyone choosing someone else when this person was one of the options. How could they?

"You're needlessly kind," he said with a laugh.

"I come here, every week and listen to you," Will said which was far more true than he had intended. His obsession was his secret and here he was blurting it out, "I love every note. I'm a reader not a musician but still, I love every note. They'll be able to see your brilliance."

The boy turned and stared. Stared. He looked at Will like he was looking at something that he had never seen before. Like he was seeing an impossible vision. Will was suddenly nervous. No one looked at him like that. People looked at him because he was pretty but no one looked at him like they wanted to see his soul.

"Your music is beautiful," Will said as simply as he could. He said it like he wasn't getting lost in the eyes of a stranger. Will didn't know his name. And yet he needed this person to know how amazing he was.

"My music is passable," he said.

"You're one of those. I probably could have guessed if I was thinking about it, of course you're one of those," he said.

"Those?" he asked.

"Those people who down play their own achievements," Will said.

"Would you rather I boast?" he asked. He was releasing his grip on the violin case as he talked. He leaned back against the bench beside Will and gave him a smile. It wasn't his stage smile for charming crowds, this was more honest. Will gave him an exaggerated expression of consideration and then nodded. It got a laugh.

"No really, impress me," Will teased.

"I went to Juilliard. I graduated with high honours though not quite top of my class. I am the only child of over achieving parents and that not quite the top was a bit of a disappointment. I do all the arrangements for the string quartet I am in. We mostly do weddings. I hate weddings but they pay well. This audition is for the symphony. The Symphony. I haven't told my parents so they won't be disappointed if I don't get it," he said.

Will laughed, "I'm sorry I asked. I feel a little incompetent just sitting here. Why play in the park?"

"It's fun and no one expects me to be impressive," he said with a shrug, "Symphony people are snotty and wedding people are high strung. I like to just play music without all of that. Last Tuesday an elderly couple waltzed while I played. They waltzed just because there was music and they could. I like it out here. Do you really come every week?"

Will considered lying because it was very nearly stalking but he'd already said it so he nodded, "I read, I listen, I hope I don't get rained on."

"And you hide over here while you do it?" he asked with a laugh.

"If I went and sat on your side of the tulip garden, it would be obvious that I was stalking you. I was trying to be discreet," Will said hoping he could cover his creepiness with humour.

"Shall I play on your side today or would you rather continue hiding?" he asked turning his violin case on his lap so that he could unlatch it. He had long narrow hands and was pulling his gloves off as he spoke and Will found himself noticing. Who knew that gloves were so damn interesting? Where did this boy get off having beautiful hands as well as everything else? Will shook the thoughts off as he looked out down the path at the overcast day.

"I can't hide now," Will said.

"True," the violinist said, "I know you now, I'm going to be looking for you. Tell me your favourite. Today I'll play for you. I like having someone to play for."

Will blinked a few times and looked down at the little screen in his hands because he didn't want to stare. He could feel the attention on him. It mattered. The answer to this question mattered. He didn't know the name of a single piece of music but he didn't want to choose something silly and be thought stupid by someone like this.

"The one from last week that sounds like flying," he said.

He was taking out the violin as Will was thinking and was fussing with the bow when Will said that. He shook hair out of his eyes and lifted the instrument to play just a few bars. Will nodded. He hadn't thought that his comment would make any sense.

"Now you need to tell me your name," he said as he closed his case and checked the tuning on his instrument.

"William, Will," he said.

"Lovely to meet you, Will. I'm James though a very small number of people call me Jem," he said.

"Hello Jem," Will said deciding to put himself in that small number just to see if he would be accepted. It earned him a smile.

"Hello," Jem said and then he stood up, leaving his case open on the ground beside Will and his jacket tossed over the back of the bench. He was someone different again, the performer instead of just a person but he gave Will a smile before he started to play the piece that sounded like flying.

Today, Will didn't pretend he wasn't watching.


	3. Star Gazing

**Star Gazing**

(going away to college AU)

James Carstairs had spent the last two months in China visiting his grandparents and reconnecting with his roots. His mother had been adamant that the trip happen before he moved away to school. He had enjoyed the trip. He had realized that he didn't know Mandarin nearly as well as he thought he did and his Shanghainese was non-existent. Still it had been nice to meet cousins who had never been more than pictures on his Facebook feed. Still he was glad to be back even if only for two weeks. University was coming. He wasn't so much unpacking his bags as repacking them before he left the sleepy little town and moved to the city.

He was in the middle of that process when his phone buzzed.

"knock knock motherfucker" the screen said.

He went to the window and looked down at the driveway. A black car - a third hand sports car that he knew had a ding in the roof - sat in front of his house and a figure sat on top of it. He smiled down at him and left his half packed suitcases strewn across his room. He took the stairs two at a time and showed his mother that he had a sweater before he said, "See you before midnight!" because that was the rule. She waved without looking up. 17 years of excellent behaviour had bought him the leeway to just leave the house at a dead run every once and awhile.

Outside, Will slid down off the roof of his beat up car and grinned in the light of the street lamp. He was tall and wore a pair of battered khaki shorts and a t-shirt with a band name on the front. His hair was a mess of ink black curls. Jem had thought he'd have to wait until tomorrow to find him and to have him here at his door was the best coming home gift he could have received.

"Jem, how was Beijing?" Will asked in an almost formal tone. No one else called him Jem. He was always James or sometimes Jian Ming if he was in trouble.

They had met when Jem had moved to town at eleven following his father's death. Will had been the kid who sat beside him and had been assigned to help him navigate the school. During a group project Will had tried to call him Jimmy as a joke. It hadn't gone well. There had been death threats and Will had gone looking for a new nickname. Jem was apparently an old fashioned British short form for James. This was something he took on faith because if there was some strange quirk of British history, Will probably knew it. The only thing he read more of than novels was books on history.

"Shanghai," he corrected as he threw his arms around Will.

Will pulled him into a hug that was just over the line from appropriately friendly. They'd been skirting the line between friends and something else since a New Year's party that had ended with them curled up in one another's arms behind the sofa in Jessamine Lovelace's basement. Jem could still remember waking to Will's breathing against his neck andit haunted him sometimes. He would wake up feeling like something was missing because the warmth of Will's body wasn't there.

"There's a meteor shower tonight," Will said. Jem immediately looked up but there wasn't anything to see against the bright light of the street lamps that lined the road. Will was still standing too close and Jem looked back at him.

"We won't be able to see it here," Jem said.

"I've got all kinds of food you can't get in China and a bottle of wine I borrowed from my dad," Will said, "Let's go out to the bluffs."

"I've missed you and your mad schemes," Jem said.

"I've just missed you," Will said and he leaned in so Jem could feel his breath on his ear as he spoke. It brought back such a strong sense memory of that night at the party that he was a little surprised that Will's legs weren't tangled with his and there was so much space between the two of them.

Will caught his expression and grinned but didn't say anything. This is how it went. They would come up to the edge and one of them would back out before it could start. Jem had been the one to back away more than once but tonight it was Will who turned and scampered over to the driver's side.

Jem slid into the passenger's seat and the car was almost more familiar than his own house had been. He was truly home if he was surrounded by the smell of that stupid air freshener and Will's aftershave and the almost ignorable gym bag somewhere in the back seat. Jem rolled down the window and smiled at Will as he pulled away from the curb and they headed out of town.

Will drove fast and they kept the music loud. The wind whipped in through the open windows and brought the smells of late summer with it. Cut grass and dry earth and somewhere not to far away a whiff of woodsmoke. Jem shook the hair of his eyes when the wind pushed it over his face and he stared out at the shapes of trees and the little spots of light marking houses as they flew by.

He watched the scenery and when he thought he wouldn't get caught, he watched Will in the dull light of the car. He had long fingers and his movements were always graceful even when he was just fiddling with the radio to skip a song he didn't like. Will was a history buff who knew the hills around town like the back of his hand. His mother had grown up on this land and taken him and his sisters hiking throughout their childhoods. Jem didn't even stop to consider that he should ask where they were going. Where ever it was, it would be good.

Will was his best friend and one of the least predictable people he knew. He had flirted his way through his teenage years but never dated seriously. He always had an invite to a party but that never stopped him from quoting obscure poets or disappearing into his head for hours at a time. Jem knew that if he started opening compartments and bags he would find three notebooks within easy reach. Will liked to scribble down everything - poetry or lyrics or just a phrase he found funny - he had hundreds of pages of words.

Jem knew him better than he knew anyone else and Jem didn't think anyone knew him like Will did. It should have been easy to say the three little words that sat in his mouth when they were together like this but they would never come out. He opened his mouth to say it but the song changed and Will glanced his way as he checked his blind spot for a turn and his nerve fled.

* * *

There were two paths leading up the bluffs and Will bypassed them both and parked not in one of the lit and signed lots where all the other sky gazers were but on the side of the road. Jem was an urban kid. He didn't trust forests. He tried to take solace in the fact that Will was confident about where they were and where they were going. He tossed Jem a blanket and a flashlight and gathered up a backpack full of food before setting off into the trees.

Jem hesitated for just a moment but Will yelled back and insult about "city slickers" and he turned on his light and followed Will's little spot of brightness into the shadows. Faith and bravado against the rustle that was probably squirrels and not wolves.

They climbed up a snaking path that led the way to the top of the bluffs. It wasn't a wide paved space with a railing and benches like the spot down to the west where they could pick out the lights of everyone else. The crowd who had come out to see the meteor shower that night seemed like they belonged to another world. This was a small clearing that broke off down to the water in a sheer drop. They were higher than everyone else. They were at the top of the world. Jem inched a little closer to the edge and Will grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

"There are loose rocks and I don't know where they are in the dark," Will told him. They retreated to a patch of grass just outside the trees and spread out the blanket. Jem laid down immediately and looked up. Will was opening up his bag of snacks but he stopped and came to join him.

He lay down so their shoulders touched and their heads were close together and Jem shifted his head so that he could feel Will's curls against his temple. The sky was a tapestry. Clear and bright and full of stars. When he saw the first one fall he reached out to grab Will's wrist to point it out.

"If it's a meteor shower do you get a wish?" Will asked in a tone of voice that made it sound like he truly cared about the semantics of wish granting. Jem was about to answer him but Will distracted him by adjusting their hands so that he could hold on. Jem squeezed his hand in encouragement but didn't look at him. Looking at him would be too much.

"Only on the first one," Jem said as though he was sure of the rules. Will pointed out another squeezing Jem's hand to get his attention while he pointed. Jem missed the meteor entirely. He had to gather his attention back together so he could ask, "What would you wish for?"

"If you tell it won't come true," Will told him sounding indignant that he would even suggest breaking such a sacred magic as wishing on stars. Jem laughed and looked for another. He held onto Will's hand, this little tether to the thing that hovered just outside the normal lines of their friendship.

"What if I wished for wine and British snacks?" Jem asked.

"That's an exception," Will said and he let go of Jem's hand to roll away and grab the backpack. Jem stayed staring at the sky as a pair of meteors shot past above his head and dwindled at almost exactly the same time. He sat up and looked at Will who had poured red wine into a pair of plastic cups and passed one to Jem without looking.

A moment later, Will turned to him and raised his own cup, "Here's to new beginnings," he said.

The plastic didn't clink but they pretended that they did and took a sip of the wine. Jem wasn't a fan of wine but this one was sweet enough and rich enough to balance out the bitterness. He took another drink and smiled down at the the cup. The liquid was dark against the white of the plastic but the colour was invisible in such limited light. He looked up again and Will was watching him.

He was starting to say something and then giving up on it over and over again. Jem reached out a hand and held it palm up. Will lined his up and they were almost exactly the same size. Jem laced their fingers and smiled in what he hoped was an open and encouraging way. Say it, please say it because I can't, he thought as loudly as he could.

"I missed you so much," Will said which wasn't quite what he wanted to hear but it was good enough.

"It's good to be back here," Jem said and tightened his hold on Will's fingers. He couldn't even say this and he felt like a coward so he tried again, "I missed you every day, next time I'm bringing you with me."

"Two weeks from now you leave for uni," Will said.

"So do you," Jem said but he understood what he meant. He sighed, "Oxford's not so far away."

"Yeah it is," Will said, "But it doesn't matter. I didn't take it. I never really wanted to go to Oxford. Family legacy be damned. My grandfather nearly threw a fit over it. I'm going to LSE. History and Government so at least he can imagine me becoming an MP instead of a dreaded English teacher."

Jem dropped his head to hide his smile. He put his drink down and took Will's and put that down as well and then threw his arms around him. Will laughed and pressed his face into the crook of Jem's neck, another memory for him to call up when he was alone. He turned his face into Will's hair because if this memory was going to haunt him he wanted it to be as good as it could get. Will's hair was warm and smelled like night air and shampoo and something indefinably Will.

Jem had a spot at the Royal College of Music that he had fought for through rounds of auditions and applications and wasn't prepared to give up for anything. He was looking forward to moving to the city but it wasn't until Will told him that he as coming too that he realized how much he hated the idea of moving there alone. The London School of Economics wasn't that far on the tube. He laughed and pulled Will in a little closer.

This wasn't the two week countdown to losing him that Jem had feared it was. He had fought his mother on the timing of the China trip because it would mean losing his last summer with Will. He had made excuses about working and building up his savings. He had tried to explain it away as needing to prepare for the level of skill he would be expected to maintain once he started at the Royal College.

Nothing had worked because there was a solution to everything and Wen Yu Carstairs was very good at solutions. But the true problem wasn't solvable with practice schedules or budgets. The true problem was that those two months were supposed to belong to Will and instead she had given them to Shanghai and cousins and showing Jem where he had been born.

But now London loomed not as some place to go alone but someplace to explore with Will. With Will's hair against his cheek he could imagine it. The halls and the libraries and Will reading books bigger than his head while Jem worked out musical theory problems beside him. They could get lost on the tube together and find new places together and argue over movies like they always did.

Will untangled himself as the hug was crossing that line and Jem let him go though a part of him wanted to grab his shirt and pull him back. Another part of him whispered that he shouldn't risk it if they were moving to the city together. Just be friends. Being friends had been perfect for so long, why risk it now?

Will took another drink of wine and then dug into his bag and passed Jem a pack of crisps. He laughed and threw them back. They bounced off the side of Will's head even in the dark.

"Authentic British cuisine, that is," Will said and Jem shook his head at him. He would drag someone all the way up to the bluffs to make a joke like that. He did pull Will in then before he could pull some horrible processed snack cake out of his bag. Will let himself be dragged away and settled in close to Jem and put his head his shoulder and looked up at the sky again.

They sat like that tilted together while they drank their wine and watched the stars fall.

* * *

Will finished his wine and smiled at the person beside him. He had his arm behind, but not quite around Jem who was genuinely watching the sky and smiling each time he caught sight of a meteor. Will cared about astronomy about as much as he cared about the social life of bread-mold but it had seemed like the type of thing that Jem would like. Stars were beautiful and Jem liked beautiful things. He liked to imagine the world as bigger and deeper and stranger than most people saw it. He was the type of person who found magic in rain storms and broken radios that could only get in the oldies station.

"It's like it's trapped in the past. It can't move forward so it holds onto the songs it remembers," Jem had said about the radio. They'd been thirteen and exploring Will's attic and going through all the old things up there. Will liked poetry, even then he had liked poetry. He read poetry but Jem somehow always managed to see poetry in the world around them.

Will leaned a little closer because every time he did Jem responded. He imagined that Jem returned his little overtures all the time but tonight he had convinced himself that it wasn't imagination. Tonight it seemed like Jem was just as happy to have their hands linked together as he was. The way he'd run down the steps to throw his arms around Will's neck, the way he'd held on when Will had taken his hand, those weren't things he had imagined.

He hoped.

Will had nursed this crush for years.

At first because he couldn't admit to his interest and then because he was sure it was a one way feeling. Then half-drunk at a party, he'd found Jem hiding behind a sofa, reading. He hated parties and only came if Will insisted and promised not to abandon him. He had sunk down and apologized for leaving him alone and Jem had put his arm around his shoulder in a perfectly friendly way.

Will, in his infinite ability to make everything worse, had rolled into him and fallen asleep with his head on Jem's shoulder. Rather than waking up alone, he had woken up on the floor with Jem's fingers in his hair and his head cradled into Jem's chest like it belonged there.

The crush had become bigger and deeper and more distracting from that night. For months he had to remind himself to breathe when Jem touched him. Jem didn't warm up to most people but once he did he had all sorts of little physical quirks. He grabbed Will's arm when he wanted to make a point. During study sessions he liked to lean in so that they were shoulder to shoulder and Will could feel the warmth of him through their clothing. When Jem jokingly shoved him into a locker because he was teasing, his heart rate picked up like it was something far more intimate.

Will's experience with things that might be considered more intimate was limited and not particularly the stuff of romance novels and love poems. Tonight was romance novels and love poems all very carefully portrayed as "just hanging out" so that his heart didn't have to get broken.

Jem looked over while Will was in the midst of a bout of staring and he thanked every falling star that it was too dark for it to be obvious that he was blushing. He still dropped his gaze to the empty cup in his hands. He refilled it just to have something to do and passed Jem whatever was on the top of the back, a chocolate bar of some kind.

"Tell me a secret," Jem said as he opened it.

And there it was. The invitation. The moment when he could say it.

Will looked at him and tried to gauge his expression in the dark. It was impossible. His imagination filled in the details that the night hid: brown eyes so deep they were almost black, hair like ink, delicate arches and strong lines and an expressive mouth. Thinking about Jem's mouth was a black hole into which Will could not afford to fall while he was sitting in front of him.

"I think about that Jessie's party far too often," his mouth said without his mind's consent. He snapped his jaw shut. Jem was going to break his heart. It would be gentle and careful as he laid all the little pieces down on the ground. He would be careful as he gingerly stepped around those shards as they tried to continue being friends.

Jem was quiet for a long time and Will started scrambling for something that would brush away the obvious implications of that comment. Jem still said nothing but he turned in closer so his mouth was right beside Will's throat. Will almost managed to stay still and prevent a horrendous faux pas but then Jem touched him. He was too distracted by the shiver that ran to his toes and his fingertips to say if it was lips or cheek or nose but it was right below his jaw.

"You passed out with your mouth right about here," Jem said and he sounded a little unsteady like he was as nervous as Will was. Will said nothing because he had - for the first time in his life - forgotten how to assemble sounds into words. Jem continued, "You didn't even smell like booze, you just smelled like you and you held on like a little kid having a nightmare. You had a fist full of my shirt even after you'd fallen asleep. It was like you scared I would leave you. I think about it too much too."

Will reached up hesitantly and brushed his fingers over Jem's hair. This had been the first thought he'd had that made him start to realize that he had feelings that weren't just friendly. They had been fifteen and Jem's hair had been too long because he was going through a careful rebellious stage. Will had found himself with the urge to run his fingers through it. He expected it to be a one time thought but it never went away. It didn't matter that Jem sometimes cut it short. Once the urge had popped into his head, it clung on. He had never done it no matter how much he thought about it. There were no normal pretexts one could manufacture to play with someone else's hair.

Jem had been hovering and as Will got bolder he rested his forehead against Will's neck and his cheek against his shoulder. Will ran just his fingertips over Jem's hair and then threaded it between his fingers. Soft and pin straight, it was strands of silk. He threaded his fingers through it and Jem sighed like he had received a last minute reprieve from some terrible fate. It was just a release of air but it was contented and relaxed. Will was smiling and it wouldn't go away.

"I always misread you," Jem said.

"You don't, you see me better than everyone else," Will said.

Jem sat up and looked Will in the eye. In the dark he was just a collection of shadows against the dark of the forest behind them. He was close and intense. If there had been no light in the world, Will would have been able to feel the intensity.

Will hesitated again. Jem with his head down was a fantasy but Jem looking at him was a person. A complicated unpredictable person. Jem tilted his head just a bit, a little inquisitive bird. When he'd been young and scrawny, he had looked bird-like when he tilted his head like that. It was a hold over of the child Will had first met and it made him braver.

Jem would not thank him for thinking of him as a baby bird even when he was eleven years old. And yet, that memory of feeling protective of the new kid came back. Jem had been small and unusual with his accent and his carefulness and remembering him like that stripped away the last of Will's doubts. He ran his fingers over the near invisible lines of Jem's face and felt the smile even though he couldn't see it.

"Can I kiss you?" Jem asked. It was sweet and hesitant and he was so close when he said it and protectiveness rolled through Will.

"Yes please," he said which seemed like the wrong thing to say to that request especially when it came out just a little bit desperate. He added in a whisper, "Always."

Jem tasted like chocolate when he leaned in and pressed his lips to Will's. It was a gentle kiss because Jem was gentle and careful with everything that mattered to him. Will had to drop his hands and grab hold of the blanket they sat on so he didn't ruin the gentle kiss by grabbing hold of him. He was tentative but not shy and he kept smiling.

Tiny fleeting smiles that Will felt against his mouth. Jem smiled before he kissed a little harder. He smiled when Will shifted and his lips found his cheek. A smile when he turned Will's face back with fingers on his chin. When Will kissed back and Jem's lips parted just a fraction, there was a smile there too.

Will followed him when he pulled back and kissed him one more time before Jem reached up to touch his hair and run his hands down to Will's neck. Jem held him and pressed their foreheads together. Will's mind ran over love poems and romance novels and thought for the first time that perhaps reality had outshone anything fiction had to offer.


	4. Dares

"If you two keep spending all youd time together, people are going to think you're dating," the guy at the party had said.

Will, being Will, had tossed his knees up over Jem's lap and leaned in so his chin was set on Jem's shoulder and said, "Who says we aren't?"

Jem laughed but didn't push him off. He wasn't sure how far Will would take the joke and that was making his stomach twist. People in the room were watching and that set him on edge. Will, of course, wasn't bothered in the least.

The guy across from them laughed. He might have been one of Will's friends. Will had all these casual friends across campus that Jem couldn't keep track of.

"You're straighter than I am, Herondale," he said.

"You've got to be really gay for that to be true," Will said.

"You are going to take this too far," Jem muttered in Mandarin.

"Tell me where the line is and I swear I'll stop there. Otherwise, yeah, way too far," Will whispered back but he was speaking into Jem's ear and it wasn't doing anything to dispell either the twist in his stomach or the show that they were putting on.

"You're screwing with me, there's no way you'd kiss him," someone in their little audience said.

Will laughed and pulled away with a shrug. Jem laughed as well and then followed him back and pressed a kiss to his mouth. Will laughed harder and caught his face in a hand. Jem had been sure that the brush of lips was as far as it was going to go but through the laughter Will kissed him properly and he forgot where he was for a split second.

The crowd pulled him back into himself hard and fast. Will was already laughing it off with a little bit of posturing and some well place joke while Jem tried to keep up.

A drunken college party didn't have much attention span and soon the conversation moved on to other things and Jem made his escape for the backyard. He needed air.

Will found him by the back fence where he was leaning with his eyes closed. He knew it was Will as soon as he heard the footsteps. He didn't need to open his eyes as he leaned back against the wood so they were side by side.

"That was too far," Will said.

"Just a little," Jem said.

"Too much tongue?" Will asked.

Jem let the feeling building in his chest explode as laughter before it became honesty, "Too many people."

"There isn't anyone out here," Will said.

"No," Jem agreed but he didn't open his eyes. Will leaned into him and he turned into it without looking. He worried that this was some sort of dare right up until Will kissed him. It was too gentle and too tentative for a dare, just a brush of lips that he felt all the way down his spine. He smiled into it and cupped a hand around Will's neck to pull him in a little closer.


	5. Crisis Line

[Content warning for drug abuse and swearing]

[This is prompt fic based on a prompt about someone calling a wrong number trying to get through to a crisis line]

Will groped for the phone and put it up to his ear without checking the number. He'd been prepared to threaten anyone who dared wake him on a Sunday night when he had roughly 29 hours of work to do on Monday morning and nothing in his schedule seemed to care that only 24 hours existed in the entire day. The voice on the other end started talking before he could say a thing.

"I'm going to relapse and I don't think I'll ever be able to come back again," the voice started soft, a young man's, "I don't know what happened. Everything was fine. I thought everything was fine and then I went by the house on Broad street and as much as I hated it," the venom in the words made Will's assumption that this was a prank grind to a halt, "And I did hate it. But just seeing the place out of a bus window made me want it."

His voice continued low and calm but punctuated by moments of sharp anger and painful regret that sunk back into calm a moment later. He spun out a story in little broken fragments that Will started cobbling back together. A child intentionally addicted to something as an attack on his parents though the voice left out the whys and hows. Teenage years spent bouncing through foster homes and shelters. And a painfully long recovery that was hanging by a thread.

He just kept talking and Will couldn't bring himself to interrupt or hang up the phone though he was neither a therapist nor a crisis line.

"Wouldn't it be easier to just stop?" the voice finally let his spinning narrative pause.

"Easier isn't better," Will said wondering if that was too awful and cliche.

"Who the fuck are you? You are not Dr. Fairchild," he said.

"You must have miss dialed," Will said cringing.

"And you just let me…." he sounded offended. Will wanted to argue but then he was saying, "I am so sorry. So so sorry. Bye."

"Wait, don't fucking hang up," Will half yelled into the phone.

"I must have woke you up, go back to sleep, it's 3am," he said.

"Are you alright? Where are you?" Will asked.

"Does it matter?" he asked.

"Yes, yes it matters, where are you?" he said.

"Are you going to ask what I'm wearing next?" he said and in spite of being pretty sure he was talking to someone standing outside a drug den, Will laughed.

"Will you tell me?" Will asked because something about the thread of humour in his voice when he'd said that made Will worry just a little less and believe maybe this person was going to be alright.

"Jeans, blue hoodie, black boots," he said.

"It is too damn hot this time of year for damn boots, go home and put on some flip flops," Will said.

"I like my damn boots. Amateur therapist and amateur fashion critic," he said.

"I'll come pick you up, we can go to that 24 hour dollar store and buy you flip flops," Will was surprised as he said it to realize that he meant it.

"I am literally a junkie. Nice boys don't get out of bed to take junkies to dollar stores," he said.

"You are a recovered junkie and besides I am not a nice boy," Will said and the guy on the phone laughed. It was bright and musical for a moment and then it exploded into hysterics for a long enough time that Will sure that he'd somehow made it worse not better.

"Recovering not recovered. It isn't over, it's never going to be over," he said once he'd reeled the laughter back in. Will could hear the smile leech out of his voice as he spoke.

"You either keep fighting or you lose," Will said.

"You're full of inspiration, I'm so glad you're my wrong number, you should consider taking up counseling," he said in dripping sarcasm which was far better than crushing despair.

"Fine. Then you ignore the big metaphorical fight entirely and come to the dollar store. I'll buy you the fucking flip flops," Will said.

"You need to let the flip flops go," he said.

"Ok then meet me on the bridge at midnight, come alone," Will said.

"It's 4:23 am, you missed midnight, you are shit at this," he said.

"Breakfast then," Will tried again. He needed to know, needed to be sure that this stranger made it through the night without losing 3 years of putting his life together again. He couldn't walk away. He was going to have to call in sick on all 29 hours of oh so essential work and he didn't care. That was numbers and paper. This was so much more important.

"Are you a serial killer?" the guy asked.

"Yup," Will said, "I target wrong numbers. My last victim was a 90 year old woman named Irene who argued with me for fifteen minutes about whether or not I was actually Margaret."

"She obviously had it coming," he was laughing again.

"My name is Will. I live on Waterford street and I will come pick you up and take you to breakfast if you need me to," Will said in as serious voice as he could manage.

"My name is Jem, I'm standing on Queen Street and I'll pay," he said.

Will got dressed and drove out there without putting the phone down. Jem mocked him about flip flops, asked after Irene, let slip just a few more details though the open sharing of that first long monologue didn't come back.

Jem, it turned out was a very tall man about Will's age with pale hair and wary eyes. He leaned down and looked in the window that Will had rolled down and seemed at a loss of what to say.

"Come on then, I was promised that you would pay and I have been up for nearly three hours bow without coffee," he said.

The stranger slid into the car without a word. Will glanced at him as he drove through the empty streets in search of anything open before 5 am. As they were crossing a bridge he finally spoke.

"Thank you."


	6. Exchange Student

Will had been sure he was ready for this. He had done all the research, done as much extra language study as it was possible to cram in, he had watched videos and read tip websites.

And his first week had been a disaster of stumbled pronunciation and accents he didn't understand and while his classes were in Mandarin, half the city got by in a language that bore about as much resemblence to something he understood as German did to English slang. He had gotten on the wrong bus and then gotten on the wrong bus again trying to go back. His advisor at the school had rescheduled their appointment 4 times and he'd eventually had to go to the enrollment office and beg his schedule off of them without her.

He was exhausted and homesick and it had only been a week. How had his sense of adventure died so fast? When was the jetlag going to fade? Had he offended his landlady badly enough that she was going to throw him out? Why couldn't he find any of the cereal he liked in any store he went to.

He looked down at his course book and sighed. He was at the library because he was still confident in his ability to pass his classes and he needed to hang onto being confident about something.

"Dad, no, I am in the library, I'll call you later," the whispered conversation the next cubicle over was in English and Will frowned at the wall between them. It wasn't that English was rare, especially at the school it was pretty common, but it had been a British accent. The homesick corner of Will's heart made him lean around the little wall.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

The boy in the next stall gave him a half smile. He had near white hair and brown eyes and said in a local accent, "Luwan," before switching back to sounding like a prep school kid from London, "Not that far south of here. I grew up near the river."

"Oh, sorry, you sounded… I hadn't heard many British accents here," Will said with a shrug before attempting to retreat back into his own space.

"Dad is a Brit. Northern England somewhere I think, but I've never been," the stranger said and Will leaned back to look at him, "You're a new exchange student?"

"Been here a week," Will said.

"Are you done?" he nodded at Will's pile of books.

"Yeah," Will said.

"Come on then, time to see the parts of the campus that aren't on the brochures," he said.

"My mother told me no running off with strangers," Will said.

"My name is Jian, James if you want something more British. Now you know four things about me. I'm not a stranger anymore," he said.

"It's like we have been friends since birth," Will said in Mandarin sweeping his books into his backpack and standing up to follow Jian out of the library. Once they were outside, Jian turned to him with a grin and started up a fast paced tour of all the seedier corners of campus in a mishmash of Mandarin and English and full of ridiculous jokes that left Will laughing. Maybe surviving the next four months wouldn't be as difficult as he had feared.


	7. Vampire Jem

The plot of dirt didn't have a stone. Consecrated ground but not in line with the little plots in the graveyard. It was still overturned. No one had noticed and come to smooth out the mess. Will stared at it and tried to stop his churning imagination. They hadn't known. He'd died in battle. They hadn't known the vampire blood that had been fed to him before he could finish bleeding out from a violent wound in his stomach. The body had been stolen even before it could be taken to the Silent City. It had been stolen and put here. He'd been buried in a shallow grave by a monster that had wanted to make him into something he'd hated.

Will tried to imagine him crawling out of the ground, shaking and hungry and lost. He would still be Jem. The stories about vampires as soulless killers had never felt true to Will. He would be Jem. Jem with blood soaked clothing and dirt matted into his silver hair. Will kicked at the earth. It had taken days to find this place after they'd realized what had happened. Camille Belcourt was gone. Most of DeQuincey's coven had been destroyed and the casualties for the Clave had been few. Will could still remember overhearing that. The casualties had been few and it had been a victory but one of the casualties had been Jem and Will would never forgive that. He couldn't forgive the vampires who had turned him or the Shadowhunters who had dismissed him as one of an acceptable number of casualties.

He had forgiven Tessa. Tessa who had sat at her brother's side and who had sobbed when she'd heard what had happened. She barely knew Jem and she at least understood the loss that the world had suffered. She blamed herself for putting him in harm's way and in a moment of impossible madness, Will had pulled her into a hug and whispered promises into her hair that it wasn't her fault. He had made sure he was never in the same room as her since. No one else had seen the cracks in his emotions. Everyone else stayed on the other side of the safe wall he had built up. Everyone else believed he was utterly heartless and it was better that way.

Jem was dead.

Everyone who loves you will die.

Jem was dead and yet he had crawled back up out of this grave. He had crawled out of the grave and hadn't come home. Will took a moment to gather a little bit of grave dirt into a small bottle that he could bury in his pocket. He hoped it was true that vampires knew where they had been buried and the myths of grave dirt held some sway. His parabatai rune was empty but he wasn't willing to give up on every connection.

"Don't you dare walk out into the sun. You were worth more than all of them when you were alive and you still are," he told the ground, imagining that Jem could hear him. Then he closed his eyes and whispered a prayer of thanks and love and hope in Welsh and turned to walk home.

* * *

Jem couldn't enter the Institute grounds but he could get up on the wall. Technically, it was illegal. Technically, he was trespassing but it had been two weeks and no one had noticed yet. From here, this exact corner of the wall, he could see Will's window.

The stories said that vampires always came home and when they did it was to terrorize their loved ones. And so he stayed away. He wouldn't terrorize them. He just needed the glimpses, the reminders that they had survived when he hadn't.

Someday he would be brave enough to end this second life he'd been given. Someday he would stay out past dawn and just move on but he couldn't, not yet.

There were too many unanswered questions. Dangers chasing Will and the Branwells and Tessa with her gray eyes and that rare beautiful smile. He couldn't abandon them. Not when they weren't safe. He crossed his arms across his stomach because he was hungry and his self loathing peaked at every meal so he was putting it off.

Will wasn't using the lamps, he must have been carrying a witchlight because the light bounced around the room casting erratic shadows. He couldn't see Will. He had caught glimpse some nights but Will wasn't one for staring out windows so Jem resigned himself to watching shadows and flickering curtains as his proof that his parabatai was still alive.

The light finally flickered out and the window fell dark.

"Sweet dreams," Jem whispered and then dropped back down off the wall to go deal with his hunger.

* * *

"Did you drop this?" Jem said it without thinking about it. He picked up the bill fold and held it out without looking at the person who had dropped it. He still found living people difficult to deal with. It wasn't so much the hunger as it was the understanding that he wasn't as they were anymore. He had only been a vampire for a few lonely months and every breathing person with their future laid out before them reminded him that he had lost it all.

The swearword wasn't English but it was so familiar that Jem's chest seized up even before he looked up. Will grabbed hold of his jacket and swung him around into an alleyway and slammed him back against the wall. It hurt. The little gasp he made came out as an inhuman hiss. Will stared at him with wide eyes. Jem stared back. Temporary. He wasn't allowed more than a few moments of staring at Will before he would have to go back to surviving on little glimpses through crowds or from distant windows.

"Where have you been?" Will asked and his voice wasn't nearly as hostile as the fist in his shirt or the alarm in his eyes.

"Dead," Jem said.

"Is that so? I thought the hole in the ground was just an unusual new pastime," Will shot back. In spite of everything, in spite of the hollow space in his chest where his heart didn't beat, and the unshakable cold, and every lonely night, Jem laughed. Will let go of his jacket and folded him into a hug. Will somehow managed to wrap himself all the way around Jem and make him feel small and safer than he had imagined possible. He smelled familiar. Like home.

Jem turned his face into Will's neck and held on. He didn't realize until some vampire instinct twinged at the scent of blood below skin that this was dangerous. Will didn't flinch. Will held on like he wasn't some sort of monster. Jem forced himself to pull in the smell of blood and skin and soap and that old dusty smell of the Institute until he was calm enough that the monster instinct retreated.

"I'm sorry, William," Jem said.

"For what? You have nothing to apologize for, nothing at all," Will said.

"I left you," Jem said, "You needed me and I wasn't there."

"I'm the one who wasn't there. It shouldn't have been you. You didn't deserve this," Will said. Jem didn't answer that. He took another deep breath of that smell of home and pressed in a little closer.

"Come home," Will said.

"I can't set foot in that building and you know it," Jem said.

"So we'll find someplace for ourselves," Will said, "Home needn't be that place. Come home."

Jem tried to formulate arguments. Tried to explain that he was dangerous. Tried to tell him that it was a terrible idea but the arguments wouldn't come together because whether or not they were true, they all meant letting go. He didn't want to let go and without really deciding too, he was nodding and curling his fingers into fists in the back of Will's coat to hold him close.

Home. This was home.


	8. Witness Protection

Will stared at Jem like he'd just told him the world was flat but he was already dozing off. He was heavy and close and had wrapped one of those surprisingly strong arms around Will's waist. Will lay on his back and stared at the ceiling and let the words play through his mind over and over and over. Muttered and so soft they were almost a whisper but they had been clear.

"I love you," he had said.

Will couldn't remember how to breathe so he just matched his breaths to Jem's and tried to calm his heart rate. Things said during sex did not count. Will knew that. It was one of those rules of hook-ups. If you believed the things that people said during sex, your heart got broken, always.

Jem had been clear. Sober and wide awake, he had made it all very clear. He wasn't looking for love or even a relationship, they weren't even quite friends with benefits because they rarely saw each other outside of this. Nights where they spoke in whispers and held onto each other like lovers but always woke up alone.

Will had started it. He had gone up to the uncomfortable looking guy in the bar because he had been beautiful and lonely. Near white hair, dark eyes, thin and tall. Beautiful. And either deeply closeted or an orphan with no friends. Will had been sure of the first until they had met at a coffee shop and Jem had kissed him like it was as easy as breathing. The idea of him truly being as lonely as he looked broke Will's heart.

The relationship was all text messages and meet-ups and kissing in dark corners and never anything personal. Jem didn't talk about his family or his friends. Sometimes he dropped details that Will gathered up like they were pearls. He played the violin. He didn't like poetry. He was a fan of the kind of strange art film that didn't quite make sense and weren't necessarily in English. He had seen every episode of Monty Python. He spoke more than one language but hadn't said what.

Then that night, Jem had shown up at his door without so much as a text. Eyes intense and expression a little bit wild and when Will had let him in, rather than take him to bed or sit at the little dining room table in Will's tiny kitchen, he had wrapped his arms around Will and held on for a long time. Will had been startled by it but had held him just as tightly. Had put his arms around Jem's back, ran his fingers through that white gray hair and waited until Jem's heart rate had gone back to normal. They'd made it to bed and then this.

Nothing said during sex counted, Will reminded himself but he still wrapped the words around himself like they were a lifeline.

"I love you," Will whispered into the silent room.

* * *

[feel free to stop here if you want to imagine that this is fluffy and cute or you can continue on for heart ache and pain]

* * *

In the morning he was still there. Awake and there. He lay with his head on Will's shoulder and it was the patterns he traced with his fingers that woke Will. They had been sharing a bed for months, sometimes multiple times a week but this was the most intimate moment that Will had ever woken up to in his life. He stared at the top of Jem's head as his fingers traced higher and ran along the ridge of Will's collarbone before traveling back down.

Will swallowed and very tentatively put his hand on Jem's back, just between his shoulder blades. Will felt the smile against his chest as Jem's cheek pulled up and it made him bolder. So warm and still tracing patterns that left trails down Will's skin. Will ran his fingers through the soft hair at the very nape of his neck and he cuddled a little closer.

"I won't be back," Jem whispered.

"What?" Will's voice came out louder and harsher than he wanted. The moment wobbled by didn't break.

"I'm being relocated," Jem said.

"For work?" Will asked. He tried to make it a joke though Jem's voice hadn't been silly, "You can give me a new number. We can be just friends until the next time you're in town."

"When I was twelve, some older kids invited me to hang out with them. I thought I was so cool. By the end of that year, they had me running errands for one of the nastier gangs. Not here, this was up north. I was also completely addicted. I didn't even know what it was until it was too late," his voice was soft and far away and Will's hand was still stroking through his hair as he stared down in horror.

"Two years later, my mother tried to get my out. They told me if I left I would regret it but I wanted it to be over so badly I think I didn't really care if they found and killed me. If free wasn't an option then maybe dead wouldn't be so bad," Jem told him and the story tapered off.

"What happened?" Will asked.

"They didn't kill me," Jem said and the words were empty and dispassionate as though he were talking about math problems or car repairs, "The police actually arrested me first. The junkie son must have done it, killed her for drug money. I was cleared and I agreed to testify. It's been three years while they build the case. Not just the murder, it's a giant drug case, it will be in the news whether or not we win. But it starts next month. I'm being put under more intensive protection, I think they called it but it won't be here."

"My god, James," Will said, "I am so sorry."

"My name isn't James," he said.

"I don't care," Will said. He twisted and slid down in the bed so that he could look Jem in the eye. Words failed and so he leaned in and kissed him. They had kissed but it had never felt like this. They held on. Jem holding as tightly as Will did.

"You can't come back?" Will said.

"No, I'll be a target even after it's all over. Win or lose, I will always be a target. It's a price I am willing to pay for this. I just wanted to say goodbye, you're the thing I'll miss most. I thought it would be easier to disappear, my protection team is probably pissing themselves. I was supposed to be in the van at 10am today," Jem said.

"It's only 8," Will said.

"But I don't want to leave yet, they'll wait for me," Jem said and he dropped his face down against Will's shoulder and pulled him in tighter.

"I make good pancakes," Will said and got a laugh for that. They didn't get up yet. They stayed twisted around each other and Will listened to stories about Jem's mother and his childhood and traded for stories about his sisters and his job. After 10, after his van to some new secret life should have left, they made their way into the kitchen.

They made pancakes and Jem kept touching him in the kitchen. Shoulder to shoulder as they watched the bubbles in the pan like they held answers. Whenever Will passed by, Jem pressed a kiss to whatever skin he could reach. An entire pan of pancakes burned when he caught Will's neck and Will fell still while he kissed a line up his throat.

"Jian," Jem said and Will looked up at him, "I care. You said you didn't but I do. There is no one left alive who cared about me and called me by that name. Jian Ming. My mother signed me up for school as David but I never liked that. I like James better than David but my name is Ke Jian Ming."

"Ke Jian Ming," Will repeated and got a very sad smile for it, "And I do, care about you, I do."

"In another life, William, maybe we'll find each other again," Jem said.

Breakfast and another two hours of whispered conversation and other things in bed and Jem finally turned his phone back on and called the number that had left four messages. They came to get him, to pick him up from Will's door in a nondescript minivan and there was a lot of glaring from some very intimidating looking cops. Jem ignored them all and pressed one last kiss to Will's mouth.

"Good bye," Jem said.

"I love you, Jian," Will said.

He didn't say it back. He got in the car and Will stared after it until it was out of view. He went back inside and lay down in the bed that still smelled a little like Jem.

Three days later a tourist stop postcard showed up in his mailbox. He pulled it out, expecting something chintzy from one of his sisters. Instead it was unsigned and had no return address. It was from the next town north.

"I love you."

* * *

(AN: yes I stole the ending from the only contemporary YA novel I have read in years).


End file.
